While many of their aged peers are living out their days in quiet convents, these women are digging gardens and offsetting carbon.....The way Sister Gail Worcelo talks about it, sisters are almost like first-responders. “Religious communities come into existence because of a cultural or political or historical urgency,” she says. “Sisters have addressed urgencies for education, or for a reconstitution of a life of prayer. And in our time, we see the urgency—the urgency is planetary.” In 2005, Worcelo and Sister Bernadette Bostwick founded the Green Mountain Monastery, a wood-heated farmhouse and unheated yurt on 160 acres of balsam forest in northern Vermont. They were joined by Sister Amie Hendani, from Jakarta, last year. The women give retreats (upcoming: Monastic School of Collective Emergence), grow their own vegetables and travel to lecture on the way in which the Catholic tradition is moving into its planetary, or cosmological, phase.

This last part, and the inspiration for the Green Mountain Monastery (as well as for Genesis Farm, and, in one way or another, for the dozens of female-led spirituality farms and eco-justice centers across the country and on every continent) came, perhaps ironically, from a man. His name was Thomas Berry, and he was a Passionist priest, cultural historian, and self-proclaimed “geologian,” a historian of the earth. Worcelo and Bostwick first met him in 1984, when he came to lecture at St. Gabriel’s Monastery in Pennsylvania, where they were novitiates. He told the community that it was time to respond to the planetary crisis, Worcelo recalls, and begin to think of humanity as intricately connected to the natural world. “We go into the future as a single, sacred community,” he said, “or we’ll perish on the way.”

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If you will, you can become all flame.Extra caritatem nulla salus.In order to become whole, take the "I" out of "holiness". सर्वभूतहितἌνω σχῶμεν τὰς καρδίας"Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is." -- Mohandas GandhiY dduw bo'r diolch.

If you've ever been to the wonderful OCA monastery of the Holy Myrrhbearers in Otego, NY, you would find something of a similar approach to life and the environment but coupled with a profound love of the fullness of the Church and her teachings - something which many of their Roman Catholic counterparts in the article seem to lack. But take heart for over the years they have welcomed a number of Eastern Catholic religious women to live among them for a time and benefit from the timeless wisdom of Orthodox monasticism.